The rain never stopped in New Babel.
It slid down the glass towers in silver sheets, pooled in the cracks of the undercity, and turned the neon signs into bleeding colors. TARITOTO If the weather didn’t drown you, the city would.
I was a detective once. Now I was just someone people came to when they had nowhere else to go. My office was on the 37th floor of an old data tower, the kind that still smelled faintly of burnt circuits.
The night she walked in, I was halfway through a bottle of synth-whiskey. She was wearing a coat that probably cost more than my rent, but her eyes… her eyes looked like they’d seen the undercity from the inside.
“I need you to find someone,” she said, her voice low. “My brother. He’s gone missing.”
I told her I wasn’t in the missing persons business. She slid a credchip across my desk. Enough to make me reconsider my morals.
His name was Jace Lorren. Last seen in Sector 12, the bad part of town—which, in New Babel, meant almost everywhere.
Sector 12 was where the city’s guts showed. Vendors sold illegal mods from rusted stalls. Drones floated overhead, scanning for anyone too poor to bribe them away. And the smell—burnt plastic mixed with the metallic tang of ozone—was enough to make you want a new nose.
I found my first lead at a bar called The Null Byte. The bartender was a hulking ex-soldier with chrome plating across half his skull.
“Jace?” he said when I showed him the picture. “Yeah, I saw him. Came in a few nights ago with a couple of Splicer boys. Didn’t look like he wanted to be there.”
The Splicers were a local gang specializing in black-market neural hacks. They didn’t just steal your credits—they stole you.
I followed the trail to an abandoned magline station. The power was still live, flickering dimly in the tunnel. That’s where I found him—Jace—strapped to a chair, a neural interface clamped to his skull.
The Splicers weren’t far. Three of them, all gleaming metal arms and twitching optics.
“You’re in the wrong place, detective,” one said, voice distorted by his vocoder.
I drew my pistol—a battered plasma sidearm older than I was.
The fight was quick. Too quick. I dropped two of them before the third vanished into the shadows.
Jace was still breathing, but his eyes were glassy. The neural hack had fried part of his cortex.
Back at my office, I dug into the data shard I’d pulled from the Splicer’s implant. It wasn’t gang business—it was corporate. A megacorp called Aeon Dynamics.
They were experimenting with something called cognitive replication. Copy a mind, store it, sell it. A black-market immortality.
And Jace? He wasn’t missing. He’d been copied.
I told his sister the truth. She didn’t cry—just asked where they’d taken the copy. I didn’t have an answer, but I knew the kind of places Aeon hid things.
That night, I broke into their Sector 4 data vault. Security was heavier than I’d expected—combat drones, ICE walls in the system, retinal scans.
But I got in.
The files confirmed it—Jace’s mind was one of dozens, stored in a remote data tower in the dead zone beyond the city walls.
I could go there. I could try to bring him back.
But looking at the rain through my cracked window, I realized something: once a mind’s been copied, the original’s never really the same.
I lit a cigarette, even though I’d quit years ago. New Babel kept moving outside, neon glowing in the puddles.
And somewhere in that glow, another case was already waiting.